The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Real-time physiologic status monitoring of a hemorrhaging patient, whether military personnel or civilian, can be quite challenging. Starting from the moment of injury and continuing throughout care, care providers would like to monitor patients for hemorrhaging. But such monitoring is difficult in most situations and particularly different in the austere environments where injuries quite often occur. The challenges range from those arising from the environment, to the physical limitations of monitoring devices, to the limited nature of the types of measurements they make. This same problems exist for monitoring a wide array of other patient pathophysiologic conditions, including but not limited to sepsis, cardiogenic shock, congestive heart failure, development of dangerous arrhythmias, stroke, traumatic brain injury, cardiac arrest, myocardial ischemia, etc.
Even current techniques that use standardized monitoring equipment to sample simple vital signs, such as blood pressure, are problematic from an operational standpoint. The size of such equipment, the power requirements, signal fidelity, and robustness are all lacking. And all these limitations affect a care provider's ability to assess and react to a patient before the point of hemodynamic decompensation occurs. Additionally, patients have various abilities to compensate physiologically, which can make detection difficult. Moreover, patient medications can make the use of traditional vital signs to detect early changes in the disease patterns very difficult.
It is desirable to develop new monitoring methodologies and platforms that leverage easily obtainable physiologic signals coupled with the use of advanced bioinformatics techniques to help meet the challenges of monitoring, especially in the austere environments of the battlefield and other pre-hospital locations. In particular, it is desirable to physiologically monitor an injured or ill patient starting at the point of injury or illness.